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Comment by remarkEon | Hacker News Reader

I grew up in Minnesota and then went to school in New York and I can definitively say that Minnesota, Michigan, and Wisconsin should not be included in whatever "Yankeedom" is, and I think my fellow B1G fans would say the same (a certain bar on the upper west side notwithstanding).

I'll have to read the book...maybe he makes a clearer argument than in this map, or is selecting on some variable I'm not seeing.

I've also lived in south Georgia (a little over a year) and Seattle (4 years), and have traveled those areas extensively. Those parts of the map definitely ring true to me, especially the "left coast" designation for the PNW (a lot of my friends in Seattle jokingly called it that) and the "New France" designation for the NOLA area.

I'll definitely be checking this book out - thanks for the recommendation.

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Y'all are most definitely yankees -- I can tell because by default, your tea isn't sweetened.

I think of Yankee as 'puritanical English' whereas Wisconsin and Minnesota are mostly 'German and Northern European protestants.'

Growing up in Milwaukee, I didn't know anyone who drank tea, outside of occasional yum cha (dim sum) in Chicago. We drank beer instead.

You're the first person I've seen on here mention they are from Milwaukee!

That's because the tea in those states is beer.

Oh, but the beer in the South is moonshine.

This reminds me of a joke I barely remember... the sum of which was, nobody considers themselves a yankee, it's always someone else. Southerners think of the North as yankee. Northerners think of New England as yankee, New Englanders think of New York as yankee, etc.

The British think of all US citizens as Yankees. The look on a rural Georgian's face when an English acquaintance referred to him as a Yankee is one of my treasured memories.

funny you should say that, because New York City is not part of Yankeedom on that map. Its in New Netherlands, which is basically a city state around the NYC metro area.

Now, I'm not saying that you're wrong. I'm a New Yorker that went to school in western Massachusetts so I know those two cultures very well. Not so much about The Great Lakes midwest. I think the map is meant to reflect economics as much as cultures though and certainly the St. Lawrence Seaway and Eerie Canal shipping routes, as well as the major railroads in the region, have established very strong economic ties between Yankeedom and the Great Lakes region.

I've not read the book, only a summary a article[1]. The article includes short descriptions of his groupings. Here is Yankeedom:

Founded by Puritans, residents in Northeastern states and the industrial Midwest tend to be more comfortable with government regulation. They value education and the common good more than other regions.

That fits Minneapolis to me, but maybe not so much the rest of the upper midwest, and not even all of (rural) Minnesota. I think it's less about culture and more about community spirit and civic-mindedness. For example, in the recent NYT map of "Life expectancy of 40-year-olds with household incomes below $28,000, adjusted for race"[2], Minnesota and the northeast look fairly similar (along with Washington and Oregon). Or look at Presidental election results.

Wisconsin used to fit this, but is drifting apart from Minnesota, as discuss in this piece[3].

[1]: https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/govbeat/wp/2013/11/08/w...

[2]: http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/04/11/upshot/for-the...

[3]: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/24/opinion/sunday/right-vs-le...

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